The Biography of Tien - Yien Li ( 1945 - )

Mr. Tien-Yien Li, of Hunan ancestry, was born in June of 1945 in Sha County, Fujian Province of China. His father, Ding-Xun Li, studied overseas at the medical school of Tokyo Imperial University and received a medical doctorate degree. In 1934, he returned to China and became a faculty member of Hunan Xiang-ya Medical School. In 1939, he served as president of Fujian Provincial Medical College. At age three, Tien-Yien Li followed his parents to Taiwan, where he received his education until he graduated from college. He graduated from the Department of Mathematics at the National Tsinghua University in 1968, the first mathematics graduating class of the University. After a year of mandatory military service, he went to the U.S. and attended the University of Maryland to study for his PhD in mathematics. He received his doctorate in 1974 under the guidance of James A. Yorke. Tien-Yien Li was an instructor in the mathematics department of the University of Utah from 1974 to 1976. From 1976 to present, he taught at Michigan State University, three years as an assistant professor and four years as an associate professor. He has been a full professor since 1983. In 1998, he received the title of University Distinguished Professor. Tien-Yien Li was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Mathematical Research Center of the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1978 to 1979. He has been a Guest Professor at Jilin University (since 1987) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (since 1991). As a Visiting Professor, he worked at Kyoto University’s Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences(1987-1988), the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley (1998), and the City University of Hong Kong (2000). In the summer of 1997, he was a Senior Research Member in the Advanced Theoretical Science Research